RHEVIREON: The Hermetic Elders of the Black Sun
by Kaesar
Summary: Think of the coming of a superior race, of alien tribes that conquer the earth, taking over our world, seeking their long prophesied homeland. Imagine cyborg female gladiators fighting wild animals to the death, in a new Alaskan imperium. A place where, each year, nine virgin women are to be chosen, for the red night, forced to be married to their alien masters, in a mass wedding.


RHEVIREON  
VOLUME I THE HERMETIC ELDERS OF THE BLACK SUN _By_ _  
_  
R CONTENTS

PROLOGUE 8

Part One

i. THE BEGINNING 16

ii. MADAME YALDA 24

iii. EXPEDITION TO THE FAR EAST 32

iv. THE CAB 744 49

v. ALETHEIA 57

 _An epigraph_ _  
_

Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit oder der Tod.

 **PROLOGUE**

As the years blend into centenaries, and the outer reaches of the mythos into a half-verity, when six bloodlines intersect, and three sects crosses swords, one cult rips apart the kingdom of God; all we are in the gutter of a world, rotten, Sisyphean.

The memory of medieval age Lombardia lives on. Lombardia, whence it is said to have all begun with the merchant bankers of the shadow Kingdom of Italy, for they are the ones acclaimed as progenitors of our modern form of the trade, the trade to catalyze a neoteric Western civilization of sorts; the craft of banking, that steadily grew in stature, through time and space, only to fall into the hands of monopoly, hundreds of years later, and particularly in Central Europe, a monopoly of continental proportions initiated by few emerging banking dynasties.

Unrivaled by the decaying mortmain of the feudal order, whose slow death hastened under the guillotine at turn of the 18th century, the industrial-banking tribes would proceed to contribute, behind closed doors, to the insemination of the Old World with the seeds of modernity, culminating with the failed Revolutions of 1848, thenceforth, their liberal ideals, embodied in the transatlantic European man has further propagated overseas, into America.

So unto this day, across the globe, their presence still is tangible, albeit, it had greatly diminished.

For it was only a matter of time, for the cosmopolitan tribes, to make their cyclic return.

In the near future, with the multipolarization of world powers, the developed world that regressed from the age of information, back to the trauma of industrialization and the eras of carbon, in this said world the lines defining the separation of powers within its post-informational countries became blurred, the question of who's in control of the modern-day republic spawned many answers, giving way to the industrial families of yore, so to arise out of their cynical cycle of life, the life of degeneracy and renascence, to reclaim what is unjustifiably theirs, the power long thought to be lost to the Spring of Nations, the revolutionary wave of 1848 and beyond, giving them way so they rule back on par with the state, the apotheosis of society's anathema; just as they reigned down the annals of centuries past head-to-head with the ruling classes of America, in the state of plutarchy.

This time, however, the transition of power has taken a different turn. The awakened financial might of the upper classes worldwide, had been restricted to the authority of no man; this time, the riches of humanity ended up in the hands of a nonhuman life form, the hands of conquerors from outer space.

The greatest of tragedies has gentle beginnings. Not so distant in the near future, in the Americas; the aggressive expansion of liberal democracy in pursuit of a post-racial gender-neutral United States, was a lost cause, lost into the miasma of human overpopulation, instigated by a dichotomy of surging mass migration and a drastic decline in mortality rates, the consequent exponential growth of the population diverging away from its intended interracial pattern, progressed along non-parallel racial lines, driving the Caucasian demography into a chronic decrease, against a persistent increase in a populace of non-Europid descent.

They strove not to relinquish the beautiful worldview their nation had long endeavored to accomplish, that of liberal absolutism, as the people of Mainland United States whose carrying capacity slowly collapsed under their own weight, campaigned for voluntary programs to curb the dramatic swell in the population. In public, the church preached abstinence, in a time when abortion and euthanasia were highly desirable, on the quite however, full rein was given to the front organization, be it the gaols or pharmaceutical corporations, sterilization of the multitude was underway in widespread arrays.

But truth be said, the inexorable was impreventable, social disorder brings about economic depression, dearth of food supply leads to mass malnutrition, the outbreak of epidemic fuels internal displacement, and the spread of political upheaval summons old racial tensions.

Soon, the liberal democratic cause was lost into the midst of the rising fire of ethnocratic ambition.

The people of the United States, a nation detrimentally weakened by the contagion of ethnic divide, proved a vulnerable target to foreign aggression; and so, people of the States were the first of the free nations of the West, to yield themselves to the punitive decree of the changing times.

The menace of foreign aggression came not in the form of an earthly great power, but was ushered in from beyond the celestial sphere, a race of highly civilized humanoid aliens of unknown origin, self-designated the Elders.

A dignified kind of high-standing and fair-skinned extraterrestrial species, so beautiful, seductive; a kind whose most striking feature were the infatuating tresses of long lustrous mane, cascading down their heads reaching their ankles, which was told to serve them in channeling the wafts of cosmic energy, the currents of aether flowing through nature; and through the ripples of the animate universe the aether path shall lead them home.

The Elders, compensated for their numerical inferiority with superior intelligence and the spark of creativity, pacifists who abstained from violence at all cost and whose only self-defense mechanism was highly-evolved psychokinesis capabilities; they were adaptable to the languages and ways of mankind, they managed to peacefully subjugate their human hosts, gradually taking over the pinnacle of human society wherever they came in contact with, establishing themselves a financial and political aristocracy in their respective countries, over most of the Americas and Eurasia, the useful earth, they divide and rule.

Their emblem was the esoteric symbol of the sun wheel, the Black Sun, a reminder of home, the soil, the urheimat, a home yet to be found; their sun, was the unconquered sun.

Throughout the useful earth, The Elders, worshiped by the masses as the harbingers of a new aeon, or abhorred by some in utter silence, whatever was the case, they reigned, and ruled for the coming decades uncontested, unchallenged; but only time would tell, the greatest threat to their domination over the hearts and minds of man, the sole menace to their own survival was under the control of no human being, but was found dormant within themselves, the very fact they were genetically compatible with their human subjects, which under the spread of miscegenation threatened the purity of their ancient alien bloodline; so to contain the misery borne out of such fate, the alien race self-organized into endogamous tribal dynasties, owners of the national industries, owners of the state, to whom direct contact with the inferior humans, was verboten.

In North America, four dynasties of alien blood, arguably overarched by proprietors of the oldest existing monte di pietà patrimony of the day, the House of Beith Alshyon; then the Eleckras, the Taigeth, and the House of Ashterophs; they, through the accumulative work of generations, swore to harness the radical societal shift in the nation to their yoke.

Under the plutocratic hidden-hand of this dynastic ring, the American social strata throughout the contiguous United States morphed into a racial segregation system, dominated by the elite minority, the upper alien race, while at the lowest part of the hierarchy, was the divided majority of the race of man. The state-sanctioned relation between upper and lower class, was practically that of apartheid.

A third class existed, the half-breeds, the untouchables, the rare case of human-alien hybrid, the offspring of intermarriages, the offshoot of intermixture of the terrestrial and unearthly blood; ostracized, they were excluded from the bipolar hierarchy altogether, seen as traitors on both sides of the spectrum; the half-breeds were subject to special treatment by the state, bereaved of their citizenship, non-citizens denizens of reservations with chances of social mobility non-existent. The state called it positive discrimination.

In respect to their foreign policy, the four Houses in concert with the numerous alien dynasties worldwide, every seven years were to convene at the Universal Council, the global pro-alien organization whose priority concerns were four:

1_ The need to establish the bridges of goodwill across the human and alien populations of the world.

2_ Combating the anti-alien sentiment amongst the renegade segments of humankind.

3_ Furthering research into the historical and spiritual development of humanity, in parallel with the scientific understanding of the human race.

4_ Encouraging the exchange of knowledge between the two races.

Those principles never were they an end in themselves, in reality all four but instruments that served a higher purpose towards the accomplishment of which, the Universal Council was founded. Their unstated mission remained, the necessity to secure a homeland for the blossoming Elders race by nonviolent means, an alien-ethno-state on terrestrial soil, one that would ensure the preservation of the purity of their genotype.

And so, guided by the dictates of the Council, the four dynasties of America caballed to invoke the Continental Plan, Continental Plan West, through which they sought the future of their people paved with expansionist ambitions westward, in quest for the far-flung human habitats of the Occident.

The White House, the last standing detritus of American democracy, was especially overridden by the unlimited dominion of the congress; after the former failed to veto the bill passed by the gradually subversive Senate and House, this marionette congress, submissive to the yearning political hunger of the four clans, by passing that piece of legislation, made the expansionist aspirations of the nonpareil House of Beith Alshyon, enshrined in the Continental Plan West, a reality.

So they ruled by the natural law; target territory predestined, the least densely populous, the last human-ruled state of the union, Alaska.

The agrarian territory, Alaska, the last human-controlled state of historically native peasantry, willing to sacrifice their lives than bend the knee to the supremacist will of the Elders, was problematic to the federal regime. The Last Frontier that survived the alien contagion, due to its geographic isolation and rigid living conditions, all made it extremely undesirable to the first wave of alien settlers; simultaneously, this insurgent state, vastly unpopulated by humans nonetheless, proved a suitable target for colonization, sustaining a significant reserve of raw materials, vital energy quintessential to keep the international dynastic industrial machine in working order, and consequently guarantee the endurance of their socio-economic dominance; under such circumstances it was unanimously decided by the Universal Council, that geographic Alaska was the optimum candidate for a future alien homeland.

The only problem was, the Alaskan territories up to that point, were under the command of a recalcitrant government de facto autonomous from the outreach of D.C..

Indeed, it was a reality that alien-infested Washington had long turned a blind eye to, but one which had to be dealt with eventually, for which reason the Continental Plan West was conceived and envisioned in the unrestricted projection of force against the rebellious human elements; when the time-consuming irenic measures were of no use, humans themselves would be assigned the dirty work, voluntary mercenaries to wipe out the remaining human resistance on the other side, a brother's war, under the pretext of bringing law and order to the rogue state, the State of Alaska.

This is the Continental Plan, what would mark the end of the peaceable phase of the alien subjugation of the Homo sapiens.

On August from that year, the year of trouble; on the horns of dilemma, the Alaskan government repelled the Continental Plan with all it stood for, against the wishes of the federal authority, whose threat of a military intervention was to no avail, the moment the Alaskan heads of state, backed and emboldened by the local popular support, declared their secession from the union altogether, a development which the latter strongly repudiated, demanding the state's capitulation within the frame of an ultimatum.

The threat of a military campaign, subsequently and as expected would attract a worldwide outcry from humanitarian organizations, with the international community strongly condemning the imperialist nature of the Continental Plan, calling it a blatant violation of basic human rights, but ultimately, under lobbying pressure from the omnipotent Universal Council it was decided no action must be taken.

Their silence was the carte blanch in the hands of the dynastic camarilla, to do as they saw fit.

On September 20th, the newly unilaterally proclaimed Republic of Alaska, designated its plenipotentiary Department of the Homeland with a mission.

The 25th, two groups of the cunning-most Alaskan diplomats left the Bethel International Airport.

The 28th, 1:- a.m., at the von Pittsburghois Resort, somewhere in the Bavarian mountains; in private, the first diplomatic mission of the self-proclaimed republic, unrecognized by the international community, to sidestep its restrictive status the free state forged a pact of bandwagoning in behalf of the House of von Pittsburghois; the powerful American family with a long lineage of human nobility and acclaimed resistance to the alien takeover; machinating from its exile in Bavaria, an exile with the spiteful blessing of the Beith Alshyon, forced upon the von Pittsburghois at the peak of a slanderous crusade impelled by a coalition of the four dynasties, none of whom had adequate an affluence to influence, to oppose the von Pitts in a mano a mano.

That very same day, the 28th, an hour later, at the Jurchen's residency, somewhere in Manchuria; the second diplomatic mission of the Republic of Alaska signed its conditional bandwagoning in behalf of the House of Jurchen, a massive banking family of olden Chinese aristocratic bloodline. The Jurchen's neutral stance towards the Elders was noted for its ambiguity.

In point of fact, coerced between the hammer of the federal union and the anvil of a United Nations, heavily pervaded by alien gold, and whose conflict of interests pressured its members into disavowing any direct association with the separatist republic, in this case, the politics of the Alaskan diplomacy, were those precautious realpolitiks of bowing to the west without mooning the east, the east and west heralded by the von Pittsburghois and Jurchen tribes, renowned globally as a veritable stateless financial and political force, under the wings of their private military orgs, loyal to the human race over the hostile foreign element.

October 09th, the House of von Pittsburghois, playing along the terms of its undisclosed agreement with the separatists, publicly placed caveat on the feasible menace of an alien-funded union-led annexation of the free Alaskan territories; a word of warning of the subsequent ramifications of such move, that may irreversibly lead to the permutation of the Last Frontier into something else.

October 11th, a most momentous event caught the world off guard, when upon acquiring the political and military prestige, under their semi-exclusive contract with the powerless republic, unidentified rapid deployment force orchestrated by the Jurchen's own paramilitary organization, landed on the Alaskan soil.

The 12th, the von Pitts' heads of family enquired, what the hell the Chinese were doing? Their private intelligence agency investigated, before the foot-in-both-camps gimmick, the masterpiece of the Alaskan diplomacy was compromised, and the separatists denied.

The 13th, based on the last developments, the House of von Pitts., now threatened to step back from the secret pact, re-evaluating its non-interventionism ethos, the core of a long-established neutrality in international disputes, thus rescinding the covenant with the newborn country _in toto_.

October 14th, in a sudden escalation of events, a foreign internal defense unit, of the von Pittsburghois' own security faction, grounded on the capital Juneau, under preemptive war tactics, casting their lot with the Alaskan militia, which they supplied with arms, in alliance with the House of Jurchen to the interference of whom they had shown initial objection, all versus the sworn enemy of humanity; on the dawn of the military campaign, Divide Et Impera, waged by the Mainland United States against the separatists and their Sino-German proxies.

Now, with all belligerents taking part in the conflict, showing their cards, the Houses of Beith Alshyon, the Taigeth, the Ashterov and the Eleckras, admitted their involvement in the Alaskan crisis.

I  
THE BEGINNING

March 22nd

 _Day in and day out, who is greater than I? The soul they long humiliated and degraded, now is above them all!_ The thoughts rumbled inside of his head, what then had swept him over into the uncharted turf of a transcendent dream, wasn't other than an astral whisper, thoughts echoed against the Spartan traits chiseling his face. In his metallic grey eyes the irresistible emanation of an awakened cognitive dissonance found its release, the ambivalence of his true inhibited self, coexisting in disgust at the decadence of soulless modernity but with admiration for the all-permeating universality of the modern world.

His name was, Dusk, Dusk Cezraef, a half-breed. But they hardly suspected, for what distinguished his specimen he lacked, no trace of their heterochromia iridum was to be found in him, that condition most recognized in the half-breeds, of each iris being of different color than the other was something absent from his eyes.

But one thing for sure was remarkable about him, the failed, insignificant man he was, or so they thought of him; yet none of them could read the signs, that somewhere inside of this man a brutal Will manifested, somewhere the wyrd awaited, unseen, to mightily unleash when the time would come, the kairos in which the wyrd is decided.

And it resembled nothing had he seen in the past of his life, the crepuscular horizon of that evening buried in those surging skies of a humanness creation, where the immersive stars were intractable, anymore.

Hoyden, by his side, clung to his jacket, a grey parka, Dusk had placed on her shoulders, not to keep her warm against the mild cold of March, but all she sought was the touch and feel of his presence around her, the scent of the past that invoked memories bygone, after his long departure and return.

Sitting on the edge, they'd climbed the rooftop's cell site, their vantage point over the city limelight; on the rooftop, lattice aerials made hideouts for scores of the twilight moths.

There, at the apex of the high-rise, they'd subtle injection, euphoric doses. The metropolis stretching before their sight, divided by nine boroughs on the whole, linked together via a plexus of causeways spanning over the north, to the south and western vicinities, distinguishing most of the confluent districts of the panhandle megalopolis; in effect this congregation of boroughs had surrounded and overtime encompassed the undecidable figure core of our city, an enclave, a shanty town, old Juneau.

Eastward, at a distance, the sprawl of hi-tech skyscrapers laid on slopes of a spur of tapering hills, juxtaposing the industrial district with its looming construction of processing plants whose soaring chimneys, akin to belfries burning out tens of miles away into the wilderness, from where the Gastineau Channel had flowed, after its discharge of zinc-contaminated waters had waned significantly, due to isostatic rebound defect of the post-global warming era; the channel eventually came to run across the urban surroundings in a configuration of streams' estuary, disjointing those districts by natural harbors, all fluxed into the ocean.

A retrofitted copy of the city's polyomino of reinforced concrete tube buildings was, this apartment complex where they had lived for so long, the complex incorporating elements of the Megalith Industrial architecture, the architectonic acclimatization for salting away the capex, an integral part of the booming tiger economy of Juneauton Weltzentrum, the Zentrum, from many cities was Juneauton center of the world.

Somehow, he pro-liberal stance of hard scientific and technological prowess, brainchild of the authoritarian Assembly of the Theocrats, abbrev. ASTHE, proved effective.

Out of his pocket, Dusk produced a harmonica, he blew into it, blew his spleen, the way he did time and time again, whenever the transient gods of elation parted him and the winds of sorrow juddered his soul; in its overstrung and blue tunes they found their solace, what brought them to the rooftop one evening after the next, was something they indulged in.

It was said, it all happened after a strained period of relative peace, the by-product of a stale war, the bellum omnium contra omnes, the codenamed Divide et Impera, after which the Republic with the exception of Juneau, under terms of the Concession Charter, dissolved into a borderless international zone up for grabs, prompted by the interminable voracity after assuring a bit much of cabotage rights over the territorial waters and across airspace of geographic Alaska.

Today, circa 0115 A.P., Anno Pactum, according to the Occidental Regal Calendar.

The theocratic Occidental Regnum, what had formerly stood as the short-lived Republic of Alaska and its transient international zone successor, had been sundered unequally between the occupying forces, the three colonizing powers at last had reached an agreement, with the capital Juneau alone placed under the human administration of the apostate House of von Pittsburghois and House of Jurchen, after they had presumably turned their backs to the Alaskan separatists they pledged to aid, but against whom they conspired with the American military, under the virtual ownership of the Universal Council, which spearheading the unholy alliance of the Beith Alshyon, the Taigeth, the Eleckra and the House of Ashterov, lusting after their wet dream of an alien-ethno-state, they had the lion's share, knitting to themselves the rest of Alaska in its entirety; to which, and for good reason, they had given the name, The Occidental Regnum.

In essence Alaska was divided into two separate polities, with the Alaska Interior separate from its historical capital Juneau, once the financial district of the Republic; all a scheme whose origins go back to the ratification of the Concession Charter, based on which Juneau did no longer exist, nominally.

To put an end to bloodshed, the Concession Charter was formulated by the capitulating Alaskan separatists, propounding their plan to reach a peaceful resolution to the alien homeland question, a resolution that would also ensure a living space for the last pockets of the native human populace of the crumbling Republic of Alaska, for which reason they reluctantly acceded to the colonizing powers' will, that demanded the nation's unconditional approval to dissolve the republic with the concession of its territories to the United States Pyrrhic victor, negotiating on behalf of its enablers, as the first step in their hundred-year social engineering project, Continental Plan West, whose implementation was halted at large during the transitory period of the international zone, to be enforced afterwards through a constitutional amendment from clause one to five, in article I of the Occidental Regnum's constitution; it stated:

Clause 1: The highly urban Alexander Archipelago region whose beating heart is the capital Juneau, is de jure under the socio-economic domination of humans represented in the Sino-German dynastic alliance, the Jurchen-Pittsburghois, legally represented by the multinational megacorporation the Trans-Pacific Company, while the interior regions of Alaska are placed under the protectorate of the United States, the presumptive victor in the Divide Et Impera conflict.

Clause 2: Juneau, is no longer the Republican capital, to be renamed Juneauton Weltzentrum by its new Sino-German masters, by name of the Leviathan social contract, is to be elevated to the status of a cosmopolitan city-state with a free market economy, subject to a liberal democratic congressional system, where the natives as agreed upon in the Concession Charter are guaranteed equal rights to their intangible colonizers, a democracy that would heal the failures of the past, where the human-alien half-breeds are redeemed and granted equal rights to all.

Clause 3: The rest of geographic Alaska under the protectorate of the Mainland United States, to be renamed The Occidental Regnum with the geometric Eighth Wonder of the World, the city of Urheimat as its capital; this organic state is to be populated by the alien race of the Elders, whose migration to their new homeland to be funded and organized by the Universal Council.

Clause 4: Our Occidental Regnum is to be ruled by a theocratic regime, the Assembly of the Theocrats, the ASTHE governed by a triumvirate of high priests, they sit at the top of the caste system designed by the Universal Council, for the facilitation of the social segregation between the liberators and their native human subjects, and reciprocally the preservation of the primordial ethnic fabric of the human minority of our nation. The caste pyramid is thusly divided into four classes:

The sovereign caste, the patriarchal clergy class of the high priests, the Patriarchs Jurists, represented by the Assembly of the Theocrats, whose members ought to be inheritors of pure alien Eldersian blood directly descended from the elite dynasties, and whose sacral mission is to reign and preach the new Western religion of the one god, chief builder of the worlds, the Arkhitekton, under the supreme guidance of the Universal Council.

Below is the warrior caste, the class whose members are the elite military forces of the Occidental Regnum, the Troopboer soldier-peasantry, whose ancestry ought to be of alien Eldersian blood, and whose mission is spiritual before martial; the mission to defend the honor and soil of our Regnum, spread the new Western religion founded by the Assembly of the Theocrats, reproduce new adherents and to settle the cleansed far and wide territories of Alaska, under the supreme guidance of the Universal Council.

Inferior to the martial caste is the commoners class.

At the base of the caste pyramid is the serf class, the native people of human ancestry who objected to the Concession Charter's ruling, their lands to be confiscated in return of being granted the right to live in peace, as long as they adhere to the new Western religion and respect their duty to farm the property assigned to them, under the overlordship of their liberators, us.

Excluded from this caste system is the Half-Breeds. Unlike their status in the human-ruled Juneauton Weltzentrum, the Half-Breeds profiled on the Occidental soil are subject to the reservation laws.

Clause 5: Juneauton Weltzentrum, A.K.A. the Zentrum, although autonomous from the Occidental Regnum in terms of economic, juridical and political affairs, foreign policy is the exception. The Weltzentrum is technically to remain an integral part of the Occidental Regnum, what is termed the Greater Occidento-Zentrum State, with the external relations of the Zentrum an integral part of the official Regnum's foreign policy; in correlation the Juneauton Weltzentrum microstate must have no national armed forces of its own, in which case it has to rely on the service of private military organizations to maintain internal order, or in the case of international conflicts it is the military forces of the Occidental Regnum under the command of the Assembly of the Theocrats, that has the upper hand.

With Alaska forced into embracing its newfound identity, the Occidental Regnum, while abdicating its sovereign might over Juneau, inversely it had installed itself as a suzerain fright over the quondam capital.

Still no strings attached, the liberal capitalist rise of the Weltzentrum, had precipitated not only an abrupt industrialization wave throughout the Alexander Archipelago, towards the creation of a melting pot megalopolis, a multiethnic, consociational microstate; into the bargain was, a lingual influx of High Franconian, the German dialect spoken by the von Pittsburghois clan, and to a lesser degree, Mandarin Chinese mother tongue of the Manchurian Jurchen settlers, that cropped up well on the fertile grounds of the morphing city-state, culminating in a chain shift in the vowel length, and emphasis on stressed alveolar consonants, breeding a sort of a lingua franca, a distorted version of the natives' Anglo-Saxon vernacular, that all the Juneautonuans talked down the street, without fully understanding it.

And so, the Occidento-Zentrum's cultural hegemony had soon clouted far overseas countermining the global status quo, the Occidento-Zentrum soft superpower had beaten deep into the old Western order.

But the unanswered remained, what had led the Pitssburghois and Jurchen families to revoke the covenant they had forged with the separatists, which had brought the Republic to its premature demise?

When he'd met the urge to sup last drop of his spirit, Dusk flung the bottle against the wall, its violet-tinted glass shattered into lilac splinters.

Hoyden, who'd gotten caught up in the chaotic magic of that evening, turned to experiment the chemistry of nature.

"Every man and every woman is a star! What possibly did they mean, whoever said that?" she nudged him asking.

"Does it really matter what they meant?" he absently replied, "the gist of it is to be found by each on their own I'd say, perhaps, those words of times-past just like women, were meant to be loved and pondered over, not to be understood? Who am I to judge?"

"The stars!" her lips murmured, "how long have I wondered about them! Do they communicate athwart the dead silence around them, like the ocean denizens in the deep! Those stars, I've always asked myself what are their sounds? Are they malevolent gods and goddesses, or the seeds of benevolent demons? What do they think about us? for I think of them, of the North Star! Could it be the one to whom I pertain? Is it the first to rise above the celestial plane? Are you Polaris the brightest of them all?"

"The North Star? Far from it." Was Dusk's response, "that's rather the Dog Star in the winter hexagon or Arcturus in the Boötes constellation of our northern hemisphere!" Pointing to their locations on the aqueous night map, though in vain, when the chiaroscuro of photopollution prevailed. As the Zentrum stepped further into the night, the sky above steadily contorted into something of an auburn-red dimension deprived of its crystal chandeliers, nothing but a boundless blank reflection of the street lights it had become.

"The Dog Star! Too bad never heard of it."

"That's the one, Sirius!" said he, "belongs somewhere in the Greater Dog clusters, the Canis Major, the lower its magnitude the higher its prominence, it is the one you see flickering with spectrum glimmer." Interested in the course their exchange was heading to, he reacted with a sudden heated tone, "but truth be said, in the end, not all that glitters is a star, the first to rise and brightest of them all is Venus, Phosphorus, the Dawn Bringer Heosphoros!"

"Tell me about him," Hoyden cried out passionately, "about whom much I've heard, but still I fathom naught, he who sacrificed much, but had earned the gratitude of a scarce few. The grand prince, patron saint of the demonic, the divine!"

"Agios O Eosphorus!" said he, his gaze strayed away into the distance as he carried on, "about whom the hymns were written, his names many, but his deed survived the ravage of ages as one and distinct, the Morning Star herald of poets and philosophers, the Torch Bearer of mankind, he who had enlightened our path to the future paved with the fire of knowledge. Heosphoros the charioteer who took the vow upon himself to lead the way before humanity, in our futile pursuit to the attainment of divinity. The hymns say it is Phosphorus who challenged his creator, the day he had by trick, stole spark of the heavenly fire, against their volition, and onto the hands of men he placed it, the deed that would spark the evolution of the human race, the progress of our civilization out of the abyss of slavery in the shackles of blind worship. But for what? what personal gain had he sought when he did it? None but his own suffering, his sacrifice to the ungrateful man, for when the gods cognized what the treasonous one had done, they brought upon him the cruelest of punishments, cast away into the perpetual nihility of the liminal void between the astral plane and the terrestrial sphere." Dusk held his breath for a second, speculating, self-reflecting, then once more he spoke, "but whether he existed, or was he but a mere incorporeal timeless personification of a savior archetype, omnipresent in our collective unconscious, that I do not know!"

And time passed by, as they had the sensation of the brewing squall, creeping down the afar ridges that tenebrous mist shrouded their feet, the atmosphere grew uncannier, somber with scudding murky thunderheads emanating from yawning extensions, analogous to stupendous whalebone whales striving to swig the dwindled city towers crumbled under the arcus clouds, after they'd gotten lost, dimmed in their chasms, and the gusts groaned ominous of a climatic change. Suddenly life, had a new meaning.

 **II**

 **MADAME YALDA**

March 23rd

Thousands of miles away towards South Asia, several time zones ahead.

" _ye dharmā hetu prabhavā hetun,_

 _te_ _ṣ_ _ā_ _ṃ_ _tathāgato hyavadat,_

 _te_ _ṣ_ _ā_ _ṃ_ _ca yo nirodha,_

 _eva_ _ṃ_ _vādī mahā_ _ś_ _rama_ _ṇ_ _a_ "

Thus the mantra was chanted, words from Bardo Thodol, their book of the dead, the mantras that would navigate the soul athwart the bardo, the liminal dimension between death and the rebirth; as the monks stood by the inanimate body of a man, to whom no ties they had, laid miserably on a rock atop the distinctly erect tower, tower of silence.

"It makes you wonder, was he to cry or laugh?" someone joked, standing by the naked and cold cadaver, "had he knowledge of the fate that awaited him, to oblivion!"

The monk in his carrying out of the exequies, displeased with the impertinence of those before him, clapped his hands, twice, trice, venting his pique in words they fathomed not, imparting no sense of consolation to those around him.

"What had transpired out of thin air, evanesced into the dross of nihility once again." Sir Carl Hannigan repeated after the monks, "this is it, the conclusion to our funeral, where the dead to be reunited with the great womb, give it to them, they have arrived to take it." Said he when the monk produced the axe from beneath his robe, about to dismember the cadaver, said he when the assembling carrion birds in the grey heights, asked to be fed, so to accomplish the great work of the earth mother, and so the monk hacked through a torso, bloodless and taut.

"Look at them," the man marveled, "shed no tear for their beloved one, maimed before their own eyes!"

"Psychological hardiness, is the determining factor." Hannigan expounded, walking away from the crowd that gathered to witness the burial rites.

"The determining factor behind what?" somebody asked, during a respite the team had, as they sat camp on the salty arid valley, where this sky burial of a local woman had taken place, somewhere in the Tibetan desert at dawn.

"Call it pertinacity, endurance or the inexorable tenacity! That seldom and most desirable personal trait, determines the probability of success or failure in releasing one's highest desire, against all odds!" Sir Hannigan proclaimed, went on rambling, "that's for one, when it comes to collective hardiness however, it is the determining factor in battle, forget what they taught you about strategic warfare, the precipitation in conduct and efficacy in action, forget the numerical superiority or the advantage of terrain, the hard mental stamina under extreme stress levels in the face of a desperate situation is a dynamic force of incomparable potency, that decided the outcome of decisive wars in the distant past. I'd go as far as to say, the psychological hardiness of a people, is their greatest asset in the Darwinian struggle for world domination in our clash of civilizations."

"You know, this is what I revere about you old man!" Shteel retorted, "your pragmatic thinking, just transcends all logic! The social Darwinian strife was the impetus behind the cultural imperial takeover of our nation over the crumbling West, oh yes! the will for power of a conquered people to serve the best interest of their colonizers, right? A subjugated people whose country is no longer theirs must be more than happy to build it up into a great nation! No, that's not how I see it, the Weltzentrum is a puppet state, and you know that. The result of the authoritarian stimulus of the colonists, our people are but slaves with their own consent in their primordial homeland, Alaska! Their hardiness long waned and been defeated the day the Republic had fallen. Your vague survival theories don't apply on the Zentrum, a nation of guinea pigs in the experimental illusion of democracy, who happened to build a nice country because they had no choice, never out of a national pride. Just like that." Shteel in his platonic dialog with first surgeon Sir Carl Hannigan, broke off the idle chatter and cut straight to the chase.

"So you believe the meteoric ascent of the free city of Weltzentrum, one in its magnitude only surpassed by antediluvian Persepolis, was the product of couch potatoes trying to live day-by-day in the hollowness of material peace?" a tensely engaged Hannigan fired back, 'our people are alive, not because their imaginary masters told them so, but because they have something to live for, some people are conscious of that higher purpose behind the wheel of life, while a significant incentive is subconsciously influenced by that purpose, whatsoever it might be, just as the maternal instinct lurking in a woman's womb at one point will surely kicks in. The sons and daughters of Juneauton got where they are today, not because they were forced to by a superior entity, they did it because of their inner being dictating upon them to carry on with their first class lifestyle, regardless of whose in control. When the Sassanid Empire was vanquished by the Saracen hordes, a four-millennia-old nation rooted in high culture and science was in less than a decade turned upside-down, in the name of a desert religion, an alien social order incompatible with their heritage was forced upon them, under such circumstances did the Persians set back and accept their new reality, as inferior men and women to the desert tribes, their new rulers? Did Persia, the cradle of European knighthood, suddenly deem herself a nation of slaves by consent under the new order imposed on her people? No, it never happened, they never gave in to that meek mentality, maybe their collective image had assumed a different shape, but their individual selves retained the original form, the unalterable monad. Mohammedan Persian citizens of the Caliphate, inside, were the same as their prehistoric blood ancestors, they venerated their language and somewhere deeper inside still they exalted Shahanshah Cyrus the Elder as their God Emperor, it is the Persian factor that made the Golden Age of Mohammedanism possible, it is the Indo-Iranian blood that ran through veins of Avicenna, Alpharabius and Rhazes, Khayyam and Algoritmi, the pinnacle of an ever-rising spring of Avestan wisdom, the Iranian Intermezzo that influenced the Persianate Mohammedan civilization in a thousand and one aspect. The Persians in this case had reversely absorbed their conquerors into their own ways, just ask Alexander the Great, he knew a thousand years before! They who colonized the land, were in turn culturally conquered by the superior-minded people they wished to subdue. Mark my words, the national history of Greater Iran shall stand as a model to our future, Lord of the Word is our godfather, his Shahnameh our gospel. Just as the aspiration for greatness hard-wired in the Indo-Iranian people, never faded after the fall of their empires into the hands of barbarism, a manifestation of their Darwinian struggle in its purest forms, so must our people strive to liberate themselves, not from the Sword of Damocles, but first from within their minds, and the rest will unfold by itself, for they are slaves to no one, we surely are not, we ain't Shteel."

"What do you mean by the rest?"

"The macrocosm."

Meanwhile in Juneauton Weltzentrum, sixteen hours behind.

Dusk rose to his feet, a sigh of unnerving presentiment escaped his lips. "Nothing good comes out of it, nothing good when the night equals the day."

On spur of the moment the rooftop deck's aircraft warning lights illuminated, hereafter, the nocturnal moths drawn to the heat, seemed like wiggling electron particles endlessly spinning about their atomic nucleus.

"It's going to be a tough tonight," said Hoyden, coming near him.

"You bet."

"Well, I've something for you, I think it's time to give you this," she told him as she undid the clasp on her arm ring holding a Black Sun amulet, the filigree amulet a solar disk whose eight jagged spokes inwardly radiated. Hoyden disjointed the arm ring into two halves, kept one to herself, and fastened the other half to the chain Dusk wore, she then confessed, "my mother, my mother who had made me the armlet, told me that one day its other half should be given to someone, the one I've admired the most in my life, one day when the vernal equinox has occurred again."

"As firm as the bond of blood." Said he, grasping on the broken Sun wheel hanging on his chest, they wove their union under the grace of the unconquered sun, and they kissed, the kiss of betrayal.

And so there hung they on, submersed themselves athwart the haar-ish coastal haze, wanderers above a sea of fog, the sea of rime that slithered enshrouding the boroughs.

Hoyden followed suit, as he jumped off the steel ladder mounted onto one of those large air-conditioning units; some of the machines methodically gutted, now junk, had served the copper thieves. Passing through a back door, reaching down the lobby, they got into a double-deck elevator, then not prior to the whooshing noise would they make sure it'd sunk bottomward, to wind down at the 26th, the hexed floor, the doors slid open. Toward apartment 837.

"It's dark, isn't it? But it isn't time, yet, is it?" peeved for they disrupted the state of serene tranquility she had enjoyed, Madame Yalda the half-blind called for an answer; through her bright achromatic prosthetic eyeballs, implanted into her visual cortex, she detected in hyperspectral thermal imaging, two of her lodgers of the decade, Dusk and Hoyden. "I bet you won't meet my expectations, tonight, either." Yalda went on mumbling; in the late seventies of age, that's the norm. And in disagreement with negligible senescence, her ash grey hair had its eumelanin lost in a matter of a third century in the past, with vestiges of a long-gone beauty branding her furrows, the youthful charm that once raised eyebrows had faded out in a life-time diet of tobacco and alcohol; while the non-congenital vision impairment she came to be victim to, had resulted in episodes of unipolar disorder; withal, Yalda had the vibe to run a drug store, as a night shift pharmacist by choice, with the likelihood of worsening her chronic insomnia; still, the shop was a reliable income source during those days. Other than that, in her lab coat she so often dressed.

"Worry not, we're just as close to meet your expectations." Returned Dusk, flat out giving Hoyden the wink, their shared intent.

"Please, no games," Yalda made the murmur, as if it took her nothing to catch him in the act, hunching over a paper she jabbered away, 'so it's been, let's say fifty-one hundred and twenty days since your lease, when the mortgage got signed with six hundred and eighty dollars a month, which sum up a hundred and sixteen thousand and forty-eight unpaid bucks.' Sitting to a gateleg table immersed she herself doing back-of-the-envelope calculations. At intervals, as she longed for what had remained of a cold meal, reaching into a piece of wrinkled aluminum foil she revealed a Juneaumunchie, the local specialty, grilled anchovy and hot pepper seasoned corn, rolled in a tortilla, Yalda tucked into it, then would she sip at a frothing cup of coffee, kopi luak, the pricey ritzy coffee beans made her daily hot cup of ambrosial exhilaration, of course she didn't buy it in pounds as some would suggest, lest she'll end up spending a fortune on what! The savoriest coffee in the world?! So what!

Madame Yalda had gotten her own methods in doing almost every single thing the way a Suabian housewife would; somewhere in her kitchen, was a cage, a medium-sized cage, in which she kept a pair of toddy cats, omnivorous little animals native to Southeast Asia, from where berries of the kopi luak were originally harvested, and so to the toddy cats in the wild fed, getting a digestive touch inside the animal's stomach at the point in which zymotic chemistry takes place, only for the coffee beans oozing through the civets' intestines to be later defecated, then the feces were sieved out, hence the processed coffee beans collected, roasted, and packaged; and that's also how Yalda the connoisseur house-made her select civet coffee.

"Yikes, after all this time, same old things still, don't have the foggiest idea nor a dime." Hoyden chimed in.

"Oh treasure, before you know it," said the aging woman, oddly enough, her cervical vertebrae maintained an equivalent degree of flexion, "end justify the means…benign or not, end justify the means." She added.

"Take into account," interrupting her, his voice tuned to imp disdain, "adjustment for inflation rate, with respect to CPI at the base fifty-one hundred and twenty days ago, subtracted from CPI of present day at a hundred and thirty-seven, divided by the base year's price, and multiplied by a hundred, counts you a bonus of thirty-seven per cent in our rent payment."

"Or we may otherwise," told her Hoyden, "just carry you to the hills and beyond, leave you where no twigs you can snatch, you'll dehydrate and starve, till you die." Tongue in cheek.

"Yaddi, yaddi, yadda-" slurred Yalda, struggled not to take seriously what she'd just heard, 'listen to me darling, not even then you'll get rid of me, in sake of the mazuma. It's in the famine years of the Kamakura past, that this custom of ubasute, of elders like me being taken to godforsaken places by people they'd once loved, just to be left there to die, thrived more than the angels of death.'

"No, you listen to me,' Dusk blurted out, 'one year, all I'm asking is one year from now, so I graduate, seal a deal with the biggest contractor in the country, and repay you for the past seventeen years, multiplied by interest, even!"

"Seventeen years down the drain! How fast time speeds by these days." Groaned she, "still I so vividly recall the day they left you on my doorstep, the bastards never talked of their intent, just gone, no goodbyes, no good wishes! But what can I say, they paid well though, never missed a deadline, good lodgers who paid their rent on time, but screw them for what they've done, the bastards just departed leaving you behind, without notice, if only I knew, I'd have got done with their contract, I always thought they'd come back, that one morning they'd knock on my door, but it never happened, God knows I miss them after all! but heck if it weren't for the kindness He burdened me with, I'd have thrown you down the street seventeen years ago, the street where you belong. Screw it though, I can't help but to trust your perfidious words young man, I can see that chutzpah in your eyes!" with no signs of bringing her drivel to a halt, shrew Yalda not looking at him in fact, and letting loose a heavy sigh she said, 'I see how apt you are to the tough work, how willing you are to slog away while everyone else having the time of their lives, ceaselessly awaiting for the magical moment that would take them through the rectum to the stars, one that would never materialize! But you, sooner than later, it is you who will end up living the day ten times as much as they ever did, while they'll have to undergo the hardships of life ten times as much as you had.'

'How does the half-blind see that without a lantern?'

'Eyes are windows to the soul, aren't they?'

Hitherto, the wall clock hanging in the midst of the disarranged room, had just marked the ebb of another troubled day. Yalda walked to the bay window, gawked through the opaque glass at the northern-side of the conurbation, the borough off sight of the nacreous city; at the hub of this urban web, stood the telecommunication and observation tower, the Quartz. The Quartz building, the axis on which the geometric pattern of the boroughs revolved, over which it loomed in equidistance to three colossal obelisks, among the public known as the Solar Pillars; lofty platinum beams of whitish light demarcating old Juneau, raw iconic symbols; while the larch parks, seemed to absorb the city luster.

And so Hoyden stood to her left, Dusk to her right, flanking their foster-mother, they too stared outside; the blizzard had just begun.

'It's now.'

00:41 a.m., the adhesive silence of the night had piecemeal dominated over the little household; Dusk sealed off from the world in his dimly lit room; feeble sounds reaching out, Elgar's Enigma Variations gave some meaning to the modus vivendi he'd coerced himself into through unfinished nights, back and forth; like the eternal return he believed in, and so did she; for that Hoyden too, was involved in the uncommon practice.

Under fluorescent tubes casting broken black light that scattered through her irides, the emerald irides. He laid down, his upper body exhibited before her, across his dorsum, underneath his skin, the ultraviolet-reactive ink glowed, nara black ingredients incorporated, and the extensive irezumi, the incomplete ouroboros tattoo was revealed, as she engraved the self-cannibalistic serpent on his flesh with two-coil iron; Hoyden was the artist.

"At times, I really am afraid." She told him.

"Of?" muttered he, his forehead set onto his crossed forearms.

"Spring, spring's coming, that tomorrow or after, I'll be kneeling to the altar, to oblivion." Hoyden distractedly returned, losing her focus on the matter at hand, the piece of tattoo she threaded beneath his skin.

"Alas! you're too charming for their standards to be chosen." Joshed he, gallows humor shamming insouciance, but inside, the perturbance he had incurred inside of him, from the thought of Hoyden's probable fate for the next five years, it alone was consuming him from inside. For the instance however, his words could draw a wry smile on her face.

By the occurrence of the equinox marking the year's eve, and not until the coming of summer, on the day of the summer solstice, only then the young women of Juneauton would feel relief, while others utter disgrace.

When the winter days were brought to an end, and the gauzy coating of March's rime thawed down the eaves, fifty-one Maidens, girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, were singled out of each of the nine boroughs, with merely eighteen of them would endure as the prospective brides of nine Senior officers who had sworn the oath to the Temple. It was all a mass wedding, the relic of a mad long tradition of ethnic miscegenation initiated through select polygamy, the practice verboten by law for every citizen of the boroughs to engage in, it strictly was exclusive to the patriarchal aristocracy of the quasi-religious organization, the Overseers Templi Occidentalis. They called the event, the Fount of Youth festivals.

Intermittently, resonant sirens of the cruisers patrolling the borough were heard; as Hoyden drowsed off on his bed, without bidding farewell to yesterday.

 **III**

 **EXPEDITION TO THE FAR EAST**

Tibet, 19:06 p.m.

The caravan of yaks, loaded with archeological findings and provisions, weaved its way into the depths of the massif, leading the procession was a group of local men, heaps of scientific material mounted on their curved backs, while the foreign expedition team lagged behind the column of pack animals and porters.

"Come on boys, slack off at this point and be assured mine bullet will make of the crags your resting place." Someone cried out, some unorthodox psychology, someone wherever he went had carried with him a worn-out copy of the Arthashastra; a man who at intervals put forward malapropos remarks drenched in solecism, of improbable grammatical constructions filled with anomaly; Maximilian the Haidan, the mystic, self-proclaimed occultist, lieutenant commander within the org. The Alaska indigenous, descendent of the Hydah tribe. Maximilian the bronze-skinned man sporting a bleached curtains haircut, a holstered Luger Parabellum 1908 and hunting knife, plain tunic and pair of hessian boots, with wax-ester-rich-toothed-whale oil polished; which the Haidan understandably preferred over the standard train oil, since the latter was seldom found, peculiar to human consumption notably when hydrogenated, that's downright a no-good boots polisher! And because of the smattering of authority he was endued with over rest of the team, the Haidan often came into conflict with the others, needless to say he was detested by most of them.

"Ah, it's Maximilian! the incongruous incredulous," Shteel let loose the ire, "what is your problem buddy? Enlighten us!" Shteel Lance, this specific one, this distinguished member of the expedition, his pushy, brazen stance, was at times seen as disruptive to the overall consistency of the expedition, by the same people recruiting him.

"The likes of your kind are my problem! I am your lieutenant colonel so you better learn how to talk to me as one." A hot-tempered Maximilian thundered, forcefully ran into Shteel in a fierce confrontation, disrupting the caravan's progress.

"You pathetic schmucks enough with this charade." She eventually saw to intervene. Therese La Margrave had intervened with her elysian graces and unimpeachable judgment. La Margrave, that Machiavellian figure who prided herself with the unmitigated commitment of the entire organization. She who occupied the paramount rank of Commodore within the org; the shoulder board and sleeve insignia on her floral white leather trench coat of a seal pelt's collar, her fave, had the distinguished executive curl and lace; the fringes of her venetian blond hair crown braided, bulged from beneath the peaked cap she conventionally wore, decorated with a spread Slavic dragon, paying homage to her Caucasian heritage, they all made an integral part of her dress code, all except for her earring, earring with a turquoise stone. Therese La Margrave was the one to have the last word in setting forth the course of events as she felt right, above no one's reach. For the time being, her mere presence was galvanizing, and with the grating voice she had their attention was hers, and so they heakened; her imperative disposition took effect, in the Haidan's mindset invoking rather a sense of salvation, dispersing away the shades of rebellion against his unrelenting demeanor, saving him the denigration of the situation. "What is wrong with you? Is this what I have fought so long for against the debauched politicians in the gutters of the Diet? Is this what I have raised the millions for? To sit by in distress as the best of my men tear each other apart like baiting dogs! You made the squalid porters look more refined than you are sons of the Occident. Shteel, shame on you, next time know your place." Straightforward she signaled to the procession to carry on.

"My place!" the disillusioned man groused in denial, "I know where that is, before I agreed to this expedition of false impressions my place was meant to be on the ridges of Begguya or Lhotse Shar, lost somewhere in the Andes or the Grand Atlas! With all due respect prior to being the squadron leader within your military order, I am a mountaineer. I bear the pain of the rocks slitting my hands better than taking orders, and love the odor of the rocks more than motor oil, this is my troublesome nature, deplorable but irreversible. I chose to share your experiences and take part in this march on Tibet, not for the sake of a pseudoscientific or military ambition! but simply to quench my primitive thirst for adventure. You definitely realize how much I am of use to you, not the other way around, otherwise you wouldn't have offered me a spot within your ranks in the first place! I know the ins and outs of these terrains like the soles of my feet. Probably I, just like anyone of you pledge natal allegiance to the Regnum, but I grew up in the East, and I interacted with those squalid people long enough to admit, in no way they are a match to our conviction on civility, but truly they are far humane than us, creation of the West, as we are from the farm swine; we worship the ego enthroned on cheap forms of matter, while they, they adulate something more interesting, somewhat further into the heights of universal human brotherhood. The roof of the world is my motherland, and I shall lead you to Shambhala. Just like that."

"Humane! For His sake what is humane?" Rossuan exclaimed, Captain Lauren Rossuan in khaki trousers and shirt, exclaimed she when he had hit a raw nerve in her psyche, "you know my Shteel, and I know very well the idea of humanity and all their seraphic talk of compassion, equality and sick altruism is a reflection of their own human flaw. Mother Nature recognizes no human values; nature tries hard to rid itself of its unworthy elements and only rewards the strongest, proud and stout of soul. The doctrine of a human brotherhood is the creation of the scum of humankind, a moral bulwark designated by the weaklings of our human race, so to keep themselves at bay from the oppression of the physically and mentally superior of our species, the seeds of egalitarian slavery had been sown by the inferior, to repress the strong and strengthen the mentally-docile, physically-feeble and morally-perverted, fertilizing the ripe grounds they found in the emasculate quality of our modernized existence. Do you Shteel, really think the men of medieval times would have tolerated the belief in a universal human fraternity as you say? They spat on it, they saw in its roots a dogma of heresy; a dogma that sadly was made the corner stone of our times, times when the noble ethics of honor, fidelity, virility, merit and kinship, is derided as a production of backward society, a puritan doctrine that trussed up human progress in strait-laced chains; all of this while in chorus, they celebrate the cult of human rights as the greatest achievement our civilization had attained, why? Why is this two-facedness? In their own words, they say how morality suppresses all human instinct, something to keep people ignorant of the facts of nature, but still they bow down to the anti-nature creed of pacifism and egalitarianism. They say that ordinary morality is for ordinary people, yet they preach of a universal human fraternity. But I ask, was the wolf ever equal to the dog? The wolf will never deem the tamed dog its equal, but the alpha wolf will fiercely defend his pack to the death, his blood kin in times of need; is that not martyrdom? Is that not traditional morality in its bestial form? Why do they urge us to revolt against the ethical tenants of our ancestors, but exhort us to unquestionably adhere to the false cult of a one happy human family? Is it not the greatest myth the ones from above pulled on our humankind?"

"Excellent! You never fail to surprise us sweet Lauren." Said he, first surgeon Sir Carl Hannigan, La Margrave's henchman and renowned oriental anthropologist, chief deviser of this expedition. "There's some truth to your words, let me quote Aristotle when he said that: tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying nation. But that doesn't spare you the slagging, your philosophical insight in itself is spurious, erroneous and intrinsically flawed." He concluded.

"And what exactly are you implying by the ones from above Captain? The Elders God forbid?" Up to that point he'd been immersed in his silence, mandatory silence, keeping a record of whatever fell under his correctional radar, and spoke strictly out of necessity; a man without a name, whom they only knew by the official title of Regnal Commissioner, a political instructor; part of a network of political officers escorting the expeditionary forces, entrusted with the ideological re-education of military personnel suspected of their unfaithfulness to the alien authority, these Regnal Commissioners' reports ultimately found their way to the roundtable of the Universal Council, so to take proper action against the accused.

"Far from it! Isn't it Captain?" La Margrave retorted, "and you surgeon, say something!" trying to spare her expedition needless complications.

"I know these men," Hanningan blundered out, collected his dissipating nerve he carried on, "I know Lauren, like a daughter to me, for it was my responsibility to build up this crew, professionals in their respective domains; Lauren one of a handful eligible for enlistment, believe me if she had anything to say, she would tell you in the face, as it is, no shenanigans!"

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but my question was addressed to Captain Lauren Rossuan, no?" shot he back, turning a deaf ear to Hannigan's reasoning, showcasing a willingness to countermand any further interference from the Commodore's part.

"My answer is no, I did not imply anything of the sort." Lauren spoke for herself, "that's not my thing, to make absurd statements, it's just I'm too unbashful to do that. To clarify matters, I meant every word I said, your masters has manipulated this world for too long, the alien race is cancer on this earth."

"I see! It appears your services are needed no more." The Regnal Commissioner grimly replied.

"Neither yours." Said the Haidan, straightforward drew his weapon, and point-blank, with unbending resolution shot the political instructor to the back of the neck, falling dead on spot, by the time he was to file his report. The caravan was brought to a halt once more.

"Why sire!" cried their guide, one of the locals, who beforehand had warned them not to profane the sanctity of the mount, seat of the hoary monastery, the Mecca of Tibet; ignoring his impassioned pleas the Haidan walked away. "The path we tread on is consecrated, why desecrate it with the scent of death?" full of rue, the guide bemoaned what had been done.

"Have you lost it you rascal? Be prepared for trial!" at the Haidan's unexpressive face, La Margrave unrepentantly cried out in outbursts of unrestrained anger, "this kind of rabid behavior will not be tolerated under my command." Making herself clear, she rived the rank marks off his shoulders, divesting him of his distinctions and firearm, dissembling his Luger pistol, "consider it your furlough." She did as she said, while he stood there stiff-necked, motionless, but his head, his head a maelstrom of racing dismal thoughts; and before none else took his shot at rebellion, all then faded into thin air the instant a fit of bedlam had erupted amidst the porters, upon seeing the unseen, pointing to the heights of the mountain, the porters all of a sudden turned into pilgrims prostrating themselves in submission, dropping off their loads seriatim, shrugging off orders not to engage in the deed, reiterating the deed, they laid face-down stretching out legs with their arms forming a triangle, their foreheads rested onto the backs of their hands; not until Sir Hannigan fired off his own gun into the air, the shot heard round the massif would bring them back into swift order, the order of fear. The fear on which he fed, first surgeon Hannigan part of the confined cadre of commanders within the org; there was a sole word to define his breed, stoic. He filled the bill.

"Onwards!" La Margrave roared, and the men kicked their heels for her order, "there dwells your holy grail. March on!" Leading the procession she salivated at the sight of the majestic citadel, the Tibetan dzong perching on crest of the mount. "Someone rids us of this reeking cadaver, vultures will find use of him." Was her command, to which the dead straightforth was flung off the bluff.

"What after all! what am I to say!" All that a broken Lauren told the Haidan.

"Well done, very well done." Said Hannigan after her. "Just when I started to like him! But you know what, you've put end to speculation, that in times of trial, the Haidan, Maximilian the Haidan would convince everyone of his true mold. I give you that!"

Soon the flames of zeal possessed them all, sent them clambering the crags in a frenzy after the unknown. When that which they had toiled the days and slogged strain of the nights for, appeared to finally come into being.

"Waste no time!" Shteel bellowed, striding the distance separating them from the solemn entrance, "it's timing that determines everything…whoever has mastery over that dimension, has access to success of mass potency, I'm telling you. The only way."

"Of course, time, time's the jurist," tailing behind, Sir Hannigan paused contemplating wisps of memory ingrained in his childhood, he carried on, "accordingly men are judged, judged either to the one thing worse than death: posthumous oblivion, or the sole thing surpassing the worth of life itself: posterity, that immortal legacy ablaze as far as mankind lives on, survives on this earth and beyond; judged not by the weight of our malevolence or benevolence, but judged by the criterion of what we've accomplished to last forever, for the Golden Rule is relative. Bear that in mind, the mind which bore the aura of the Indus man, of Naram-Sin, Zarathustra, Hypatia, Mithras, Arminius, that of Ozymandias. To posterity or oblivion!"

"Let's just hope, that in the end, our greatest achievement isn't nothing but an other Cadmean victory." Said Lauren. "Where further do we take it on the lam?"

"God knows, Lauren! God knows.' returned La Margrave with a choked tongue, she then stepped ahead before the firmly wrapped entrance of the dzong where she loudly promulgated, "your magnificence here we have come, ambassadors of peace and seekers of truth! I hope you've been told of our repeatedly postponed but sincerely foresought visit! With the permission of his reverend Reting Rinpoche regent general of Tibet and in conformity with the Occident-Orient Treaty for the Advancement of Cultural and Scientific Exchange binding the Tibetan people and the Greater Occidento-Zentrum State, your attention is invited to open these gates and receive my team under the proper conditions, that would best serve the seamless undertaking of our research without reserve." Sighing said and there waited she, to no response from beyond the commanding walls of the rigid dzong, and so the expedition fell into silence. "Something tells me we are being denied entry!" she groaned, signs of her nerve-racking anxiety exuding.

It was in the midst of their vitiating confusion that somehow a little door within the bigger portal seemed to go unbolted and quietly unravel, out of which an equally little man stepped outside, donned in the traditional clergy dress, he walked through the huddle which in their inquisitive herd behavior, swung left and right to take a dekko at the awe-inspiring creature, hence allow him passage; stern and forbidding, in one of his hand held he a parchment, which speechless he handed over to whomever it might have concerned. The guide took charge, saluted the unyielding figure in a manner unique to those of the highest echelon, and only then was he given the parchment, upon which the aloof messenger retreated into the most eldritch of courts.

"You speak the language, why don't you tell us what's that?" a distrustful Lauren inquired.

Their guide and interpreter, who paid not the slightest attention to her demand, unfolding the message his eyes rolled over the indecipherable lines, before he resolved to talk, "it says, the objectives of this expedition is of considerable interest to them, the holy dzong is a cradle of enlightenment before a place of worship. In their eyes you scientists are messengers to the gods on earth, so you are the most welcome to carry out your investigation as you please. Nevertheless, deem it not as an insult but an affirmation, that first you are invited to put your signatures on here, a pledge that what you are to see or hearken inside bowls of the monastery, is to be kept in the heart. If you were not to agree to these terms, your best bet is to head back whence you've set out before the ink on this vellum dries." He confided.

"Head back whence we've come? I would rather make them lick the dust on which these men stand!" quetched she, then spoke not, but with a nod of compliance La Margrave reluctantly settled the matter, she did it.

With all due signatures in place, the guide yelled out words in the foreign tongue, and it wasn't long before the cedar portal squalled open.

"Oh walls spread your legs before the will of thy men!" exclaimed the Haidan who stood enraptured at the sight, not anymore had he the desperate tone to his mouth; his cry ignited the brackish air around them, proceeding to the forefront, as though it didn't matter to him any longer, his code of conduct; raising his arms in anticipation he recited from the heart, otherworldly verses:

" _We are the poets! We are the children of wood and stream, of mist and mountain, of sun and wind! We are the Greeks! and to us the rites of Eleusis should open the doors of Heaven, and we shall enter in and see God face to face…_

 _Under the stars will I go forth, my brothers, and drink of that lustral dew: I will return, my brothers, when I have seen God face to face and read within those eternal eyes the secret that shall make you free._

 _Then will I choose you and test you and instruct you in the Mysteries of Eleusis, oh ye brave hearts, and cool eyes, and trembling lips I will put a live coal upon your lips, and flowers upon your eyes, and a sword in your hearts, and ye also shall see God face to face._

 _Thus shall we give back its youth to the world, for like tongues of triple flame we shall look upon the Great Deep-Hail unto the Lords of the Groves of Eleusis!_ "

Then, on the spot was he quite, as if enchanted, benumbed, watching over with trembling patience, what is to come out at last.

Before all else could be seen, all that crossed threshold of the temple was, incense, the unmistakable odor of smoldering juniper leaves and seed cones caressed the men's senses, as they swallowed lungfuls of the aromatic substance taking over the scent of death they had brought along, while in its dissipation and fusion into elements of the air, it thusly reflected the temporal nature of corporeal matter, the transmutation of the human being, the dissolution of the flesh into elements of the earth, air and fire. Thereafter, only when the incense permeated their whole being, were the men able to see, what she had brought them the distance to meet, as the shadow of a monk heaved into sight under veil of the velvet smoke, then a second, a third, so a fourth.

Instantly the Tibetans threw themselves at feet of the temple in a religious trance, the expedition's guide whose head was sent to the ground, his hundred and eight strands of braided hair grazed the earth in a demonstration of obedience to this higher authority, the chief monk, to whom the parchment was handed back.

The chief monk, a thickset neck connected his head to his incredibly tall stature, preened himself in a robe of Arabesque-bedecked silk and the distinctive Gelug yellow hat, stationary in carriage as an eidolon entity of a profligate configuration, in sheer contrast to the ascetic presence of his fellow oblates; stood there scrutinizing the agreement he was given.

"Good, good, this is the hour!" he blurted out in accented exhilaration to the amazement of Therese La Margrave and her companions, tentatively listened they to what the man had to say. "Forgive us for the formalities, you never know what to expect with strangers! we don't usually receive westerners within these most venerable walls, but that is not to deny it initially was our request that you come to us. Yours, children of the chosen nation, upon whom glory of the Elders was bestowed, was the only expedition we sought to allow into our holy dzong, so to be of aid to our effort, in understanding what no eye outside this hermit monastery has ever seen, nor hand touched! We have kept the discovery that boggled our minds a secret for almost a decade, before deciding upon you… alright, enough with my tedious palaver, and please be my guests." With his order to proceed, the caravan of dreams set in motion, the expeditionary headship went in first, Therese La Margrave, Sir Carl Hannigan to her left, Shteel Lance, Lauren Rossuan and a disturbed Maximilian trailed them, to whom crossing threshold of this sacrosanct milieu was Crossing the Rubicon, a rite of passage, odd sensations overpowered him.

"Unto where my friend? It's time you are dismissed, we sure appreciate your help." Shteel told the timid guide in their pursuit, so he complied, handsomely paid he cracked a smile, and before the reinforced doors met each other again, he dissolved into nullity.

The expeditionary team who barely kept track of the fast-paced priestly character up and down the intricate alleys of the temple, observed in awe as the monks they passed-by stuck out their tongues at them in a bizarro spectacle.

"Oh boy that's lewd!" a disconcerted Lauren said as she returned the gesture. "Chastity makes great libidos, I see!"

"Don't take them wrong," Hannigan shook his head in mindless abjuration, "it's the Mature Bull, Tri Darma! without him, we wouldn't be this fortunate to experience such peculiar greeting. The ninth century king who had a black tongue, was said to be a tyrant, ruthless in his oppression of Buddhists, so a tradition had arisen among the Tibetan Buddhists, who, out of fear that the cruel king would be reincarnated as one of them, stuck out their tongues for centuries to come, as a form of greeting, assuring one another they have no black tongues, that they are not the incarnation of Langdarma."

"Careful with the research material!" Shteel, somewhere else, burst out at the porters, as they unloaded the yaks under cover of that night.

"Let me say that we are humbled to have the prestige of setting foot on the ground of your temple!" catching up with the unfolding situation La Margrave told the chief monk, on their way to the monel-stupa-domed halls of the dzong, whose inner cleft walls fired up the team's train of thoughts.

"My pleasure." He passively replied.

"Forgive my curiosity, but the damage on the walls seems recent, what happened?"

"Tremors, not so recent," he told her, "it's been over a decade when a violent tremor struck the region, we are fortunate our ancestors rose these walls with the elbow grease, on unshakeable underpinnings. Otherwise our dear dzong would have turned into rubble! For most of the villagers' homes had crumbled, so we had to house them here for sometime, our contribution to the relief effort; though it came on the expense of our savings, with the required sum to overhaul the monastery spent in the

process; still we cherish no regret, catering to the villagers in a desperate situation was our duty."

"You set an example worthy of imitation!" Hannigan averred, "besides, we're also impressed of the way you speak our mother tongue! where did it come from if I may ask?"

"It goes down to my deceased son," from a repository of monotonous thoughts and unfulfilled sacrilegious schemes the monk dredged up, "a restive man, he decided monastic life was not his thing, he instead focused on the intellectual facet of the Gelug-pa school of Tibetan Buddhism, which took him into a teaching career in the West, teaching an ersatz version of our creed, the Dgelugspa tradition."

"Probably it'd been his true passion!"

"Oh no." The monk went into a huff, then grumpily said, "there he found himself drawn to something else, much, much more fun, a depressing Bohemian lifestyle, quit his job and cut ties with his family, we later heard of his suicide."

"Our condolences!"

"For what!" groused he, "It was his lot, and the spring of his memory long has dried up, now but a tale to be told."

"There's one more thing," said La Margrave, "I am confident you have in-depth or partial knowledge of the tantamount importance our subject of research is to the Elders, are you sure this expedition was your proposal? Do you recognize the hazardous nature of the underlying conflict of interest?"

"You will have my answer by the time of your departure!" he grouched parrying the question, walking them through the halls, escorted by his aide; their passage came to an end, at a rugged wall on which a door in iron cut. "What lies behind this door has survived the ravages of time. What is behind predates our people and our faith!" Corrosion had eaten the locks that the monk unbolted, the door pulled open; the porters were laid off.

"My God!" Hannigan exclaimed, what existed behind the door was a cavern system of great proportions, a subterranean cavity that has weathered deep through the berg's backbone.

"This is the sancta sanctorum on which our holy dzong was founded stone by stone!" recounted the venerable man, "below at the far edge of these stairs, resides the light, the treasure of treasures. Follow me, one step at a time." With their research kit packed onto their backs, bewitched and out-of-touch with their former realities, the team pursued the chief monk under the mesmerizing light of paraffin lamps, the chthonic chasm swallowed them up, whole, scaling down the thousand stair cutting athwart the hollow earth, leading to the cave's invisible bottom; like the magic from Aladdin, a hanging sheet of shimmering stalactite, knives sculpted out of sinter and dolomite framed its teal ceiling.

Quarter an hour later.

"Do you see that?" groaned Shteel as their descent was near its conclusion, when the cavern's floor materialized out of the gloom.

"At last!" mouthed the monk, "there it is the cave's guardian." The few steps left ahead he and his abnormally inaudible escort stumped with calculated pace, and there were they, numbered yards stood between them and their holy grail, in the middle of the cavernous court was a humanoid object, of a man's height and five men's width, cloaked in a piece of fine cloth, there in the arms of aeonic loneliness it had awaited; men came and go, men rose and fell, but those who had arrived, there were to remain, for they saw beyond the clay.

"May I?" breathless with a radiant desire to remove the cloak off the mythical one, Therese La Margrave asked for the priest's permission, which she had, and with an eager snap it was taken off.

"Why!" Lauren snarled at the revelation, a triad of horned malachite-stone sculptures together bound in delicate tracery, resting on a pedestal of iron made. "Is this is what so boggled your minds?"

"Watch your mouth my child!" angrily muttered the monk, "our icons, ours symbols, are not, a laughing matter."

"My apologies!" in a conciliatory tone responded she, "I heavily respect your customs and traditions, it would be my last intention to offend you."

"He's right!" cried La Margrave, "we are not art dealers, the reason of our presence in these foreign lands was foremost not to evaluate the aesthetic aspect of this or the material worth of that, but solely to undertake empirical observation in hope of decrypting the inner workings of the subject matter." Covering tracks to her worries she retreated to Hannigan's side, giving a crack to his knuckles, "what do you think after all? dragged into a pointless escapade?" she quietly asked him.

"Patience!" he said, "my gut instincts never wrong, judging by their design except for the aurochs-inspired horns, there's striking resemblance to the Dogū figurines of prehistoric Jōmon period, whose first appearance was placed in eastern Japan…there's definitely something in-between! This is almost a life-size replica of the Japanese effigies or vice versa." Sir Hannigan inferred, his hand crept through the sculpture's grotesque body he then perceived what none else could with their short-sighted senses. "lines incised on the stone, words had been inscribed. Trowel give me a trowel!" he conjectured, hurriedly reached to his research kit, the sweat on his forehead he wiped off, got a trowel and a swab, likewise with an ironsmith's fervor he etched through the dead inscriptions, breathing life into them as they unlocked and verged into readable words.

"Tell me priest!" La Margrave confronted the man, "you said the existence of the statues was unbeknownst to you, how comes?"

"The site on which they reside was vaulted in clay as long as our people have settled the mount, the cave has been a place of pilgrimage, a catacomb if you like! But none dared to touch nor scratch the dome of clay, lest the bullwhip would cleave their backs," fleshed he out, "it was not until the tremor shook the cave's pillars that the vault split apart, so you can imagine what chance had exposed!"

"Take a look at this!" Shteel called on them.

"It's Sanskrit, the Nasadiya Sukta!" wondered the monk upon Hannigan's finding, the inscription decrypted.

"Exactly!" replied Hannigan, "the Hindu hymn of creation, the 10th Mandala, the Rig Veda! These nonetheless, these verses, they don't adhere to the trishbuts metric form, the Vedic form."

The verses that were written in plain prosaic style, read:

 _ko addhā veda ka iha pra vocat kuta ājātā kuta iya_ _ṁ_ _visr_ _ṣṭ_ _i_ _ḥ_ _, arvāg devā asya visarjanenāthā ko veda yata ābab, iya_ _ṁ_ _visr_ _ṣṭ_ _ir yata ābabhūva yadi vā dadhe yadi vā na, yo asyādhyak_ _ṣ_ _a_ _ḥ_ _parame vyoman so a_ _ṅ_ _ga veda yadi vā na veda_

"And what does it all mean?" Shteel again.

"But, after all, who knows, and who can say

Whence it all came, and how creation happened?

The gods themselves came later than creation,

so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,

He, whether fashioned it or whether He did not,

He, who surveys it all from the highest heaven,

He knows - or maybe yet He knows not." Therese offered her interpretation, to their surprise. "What?" taken aback she exclaimed, "it's common knowledge."

"Once I'm done, I'd treat you to a glass of mead!" Hannigan threw back with a tinge of flirt.

"Out of the question! down to business." Unmoved, dry-eyed, she replied.

"Right!" he groaned and took to his material, extracting a sample from the hardstone, the sample was subjected to radiometric dating. Racking his brains Sir Hannigan then expounded, "this is beyond me, I have to admit! A Vedic hymn inscribed on a horned sculpture, is it a depiction of the sacred calf in human form? Is this the bull Nandi gatekeeper of Shiva? Or is she the cow Audumbla from the udders of whom the giant Ymir, father of us all suckled? Is he Gavaevodata, the primeval ox fifth creation of Ahuramazda, and progenitor of all beasts? But these statues perhaps predates the Vedic epoch itself, the Nordic cosmogony and Zoroastrian cosmology all together, hence, could it be the primordial bovine of a Proto-Indo-European religion? The origin of them all? Or simply far from it, what I behold is a sculpture almost identical to Mesolithic Japanese figurines, the farthest from the Indo-European impact, a coincidence? Above all, why is this rooted in the underground of a monastery at the heartland of the Tibetan plateau, home of the most isolated people? Somewhere the threads inextricably interconnect, but where? Three civilizations distant in time and space, all met in one focal point, but how?" The man hell-bent on penetrating the seal of secrecy, exposed whole of the sculpture to radio scanning.

"No use! it's a stalemate, an enigma without a rotor machine." Maximilian the Haidan, there at the corner, talked at last.

Time elapsed by, as Hannigan examined the scan, then on spur of a fleeting moment cried he out, "I hate to say this, but, I told you so!" the veins on his arms pumped up, "there's something in-between, four millimeter of hollow space inside, the malachite is but a shell, something there dwells!"

"Take your time my son! Haste is no good." Told him the chief monk.

"I would take a saw!" he fired back, laid his hand on the power abrasive saw, turned on the machine, "It's the only way!" he declared, behind a leer of treachery.

"What if nothing was found there? What if the treasure of treasures was mauled in vain?" sullenly asked the priest.

"My head be mauled in return."

"Be it then. Be warned though, here words of honor are not taken lightly."

"Surgeon, get us through the needle's eye!" now that his acquiescence guaranteed, La Margrave addressed Hannigan to proceed, who in detailed instructions delivered Lauren and Shteel the order to commence, in unison they handled the machines, and without a jot of indecision struck the statues, the saws forcefully sunk through the malachite stone, Lauren to the left, Shteel treated its right, all the while the rotating blades undeterred chopped up the sculpture, and all the while the monk observed the mechanical surgery with a bitter taste in his mouth, casting looks suspicion-ridden, the atmosphere inseminated with mistrust and apprehension unbridled a qualm of dread that seized him, he had the unerring premonition of being manipulated by those westerners.

"Lauren, complications?" Hannigan stressed out, her struggle as the incision further progressed was noticeable.

"What does it matter to you?" answered she vaguely, "what have I done to you?" she deplored, she asked, there was something wrong with her, she moaned in low-pitched snigger.

"God! she's drooling!" exclaimed he, before Lauren aggressively hit the ground, the saw violently beveled her thigh, in blind animal panic Hannigan propelled himself toward her, tightly held her convulsive body between his arms, her profile had the pallid complexion, teeth clenching, nose bleeding, they lost her to a semi-comatose state. "Epileptic seizure." Shteel said morosely, doing his best to suture her lesion shut.

"Her medical record had no trace of epilepsy."

"Whatever was that, make sure she'll be dependable on in the next twelve hours, utmost." Therese La Margrave made her point crystal clear.

"This is wrong, this is all wrong!" spoke the monk morosely, "all the work of daemons, the statues possessed, we should not have done harm to them, enough with this heinous crime."

Hannigan, unaffected by the priest's imploration, injected Lauren with high phenytoin dosage; left Shteel and La Margrave tending to her wound, she who dealt with the situation in a state of enforced apathy. Instantaneously, Sir Hannigan carried on the interposed, imperfect surgery of the stone.

"You have no right, no…" in terror he growled, disquieted at the abrupt shift of events, in his futile attempt to thwart Hannigan's plan, before he himself was assaulted from behind, the Haidan, with an electric wire savagely garroted the chief monk, "you sick fiends…" bewailed he with arrant virulence of speech, the voices rose, breathing mawkish fire and slaughter, and the voices were no longer distinct nor relevant, stifled by the shriek a slow treacherous death.

"Father!" stammered the escort, who sprinkled his legs at the cruel death of the monk, the death that neither he himself escaped, Shteel, drew out the dagger, slayed the petrified man who resisted not, straight off. The expeditionary team turned death squad, those were no scientists, those were executioners; the priest was set up, framed since the beginning.

"That was a scurvy trick to play!" La Margrave inveighed, her voice tinged with choleric fluster twined with her own sensibility, "your dishonesty, after all, spelt your death knell. I have warned you, too bad you won't wave us goodbye at our departure, nothing left to be told." Standing on the ravaged corpse she grumbled, concurrently she made an urgent call, then assuredly pronounced, "enforcement on their way."

"The best defense is a good offense, that's the vanilla rule!" without interrupting his grind, Hannigan declared, concerning murder of the chief monk; almost done there, slicing the sculpture's malachite shell, single-handedly, the man full well savvied the machinery he got himself plugged into, he'd gone through that before, in his humble beginnings as a warrant officer.

"This is yours! you have proven yourself an indispensable member of our brigade. Forgive my ill judgment." La Margrave told the Haidan, returned him his Luger, ostensively his reward for the assassination of the priest. "You're gonna need it, the army of frantic monks up there we'll be alarmed at any moment!"

"I will not disappoint, Commodore!" said the Haidan.

"Impressive!" walking past him she then thought to herself, at the sight of the final result, Hannigan's work was accomplished.

"We made it?" said an exhausted Hannigan, though it was a zestful exhaustion, the bread of diligence. Retreated he to the side of his Commodore, hovering at her elbow, his arms folded against his chest.

"You made it, surgeon!" Therese La Margrave advanced towards the blossomed sculpture, "the most significant discovery since the Antikythera mechanism I'd say!"

"This, this is no human creation! This is wrought by hands divine!" Shteel exclaimed, out of his senses, gravitated to the lapis lazuli charms of the exhumed statues, something of a cutting edge black art, that, beyond the perceptions of their consciousness, had encapsulated them into an illusive state of Maya, a dreamlike vision, a mirror of delusions, of daemonic wisdom, as if all at once inundated their meek human minds to the point of insanity; the seconds protracted into hours, the hours into days and the days into years.

The eye of providence had been unearthed out of its concealment. And so the providence intervened, so to release them from the baleful hold of sorcery.

"My head, what has been done to me?" griped La Margrave as she sharply recovered from the pit of illusions, "as if suddenly whole of the ocean flowed into my skull, damn you what have you brought upon us!"

"It's a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen!" gnarled Hannigan under the tongue, "the hallucinatory gas was stored within the malachite carcass, ripping the sculpture apart we've released the agent which Lauren was victim to, the higher concentrations at which she was exposed to the gas cast into the crucible of her own psychological repression, explains the severe effect it had on her. Whoever created the sculpture have done so to ward off the misuse of unworthy men. Still I wonder why haven't they opted for a rather lethal substance?"

"Leave it to the lab report!" returned La Margrave "for now, your hypothesis means zilch to me! Just tell us what is this made of? Is it what the Elders really want?"

"Well, unless a thorough examination has been undertaken, it's hard to say for sure." Replied he, with a surgical mask covering his mouth and nose Hannigan cautiously approached the sculpture, "at any rate, believe me, with this discovery our names shall mark the pages of history books! This technology in its sophistication surpasses any human device, yet, it has been stowed inside a sculpture that by far preexisted invention of the wheel and axle!"

The technology he praised and glorified, the object that occupied the stone shell was a form of hi-tech organism, three of them, made of translucent alloy, their chests opened up hollowed from the inside, each had resided inside one of the three malachite statues.

"These are closer to cyborgs, but they're not, in all probability these are combat exoskeletons, staggering, mind-blowing!" Sir Hannigan suggested, further inspecting the horned organism, "what sinewy metal is this? As lax as an animal's hide but as hard as chromium, definitely made of a synthetic element, that is possibly a rhenium amalgamation with some other composite from the outer space, an ataxite class meteorite."

"Rhevireon, I give it the name Rhevireon." She proclaimed. "Manage a report of our encounter, ought to be finished by the time we take it homeward. With us we carry that which would divulge the decline of my kind." By this time the shriek of enforcement heavy armament outside the gates had reached the cavern's ears, Maximilian the Haidan remained stolid, by the side of an unconscious Lauren.

"We're done here." Shteel Lance avowed.

IV  
THE CAB 744

March 23rd.

Juneauton Weltzentrum.

At the crack of dawn, the thread of falling snow had petered out into droplets of dew, faint lines of light dissipated throughout the room. Hoyden raised the window shutter, another overcast day, inspired dubious optimism in her, she who less than often reveled in sunny ones!

5:50 am, there was damp on the walls, damp spread havoc on the bathroom walls. Her bleary eyes had flecks of hazel ripple smoldering beneath her bristling brows, caught in her sultry reflection against glass of the cabinet above the sink, Hoyden carried out her oral hygiene. At the other end of the bathroom, as the hair clipper changed pitch, Dusk tapered his head temples into an Ivy League cut.

Later on, dressed in his uniform, from under the bed towed he the only pair of shoes he owned, and a Bowie knife.

"The big glacial or what! What a piss." Hoyden heard someone say, bystanders unhappy with the hard weather condition of that early morning. She put on her leather gloves, a worryingly sick Dusk who stooped himself against one of the cars parked along the curb line, coughed he and spat, tightened the faux fur trimmed hood of his parka around his neck, getting a bit lukewarm, they walked down the narrow sidewalk.

The first peak hour had just hit the streets, the dump truck racing against time, applied salt on the sebaceous hoar. And it'd been a steady scamper, until Dusk spotted one, on tap.

He blew a wolf-whistle hailing the taxicab; it took a u-turn before hauling up inches by their feet; distinguished by a chequered pattern fimbriated on a load of orange paint, cab No. 744. There they got in.

The scuzzy smirk he routinely threw at the face of every new customer, unveiled the metal foil, his gold tooth, in direct contradiction to his cheap pegleg, the man behind the wheel wore a freaking pegleg! Hoyden had the twitching sentiment telling her, she didn't know why, this person was the prognostication of suffering.

"Well, well," drawled he, "look at who we've gotten here, Aletheia, bingo?!" sort of lending self-proclaimed credence to his assumption, as he glimpsed through the rear view at them.

 _Here we go,_ _this is not my lucky day_! Dusk told himself, taciturnly he reacted to the man's absence of reserve, "yeah, exactly!" he barely mouthed, just so that after a while the taxi driver, snoopily shot back at him, "for the moment I presume," he said, "you gotta wonder how the hell of a cow have I guessed your destination? You obviously let it slip off memory, don't cha?"

"Here's the thing," Dusk told him, "I definitely did, what's your secret?" he bore out, though that plain statement had gotten not bit of a truth.

"Say a month ago," the driver, with a legendary capacity to gabble on and on and on, set forth in a spree of spittle, "same hour, same place, must've been you the guy asking me to drop him off the Aletheia building! You didn't got enough money on you, so it was my turn then to say it, keep the change, kinda being nice to a college tutee. But hey, I'm a face-rememberator, huh!"

"This is the kind of scenarios I despise about this city!" Dusk retorted.

"No dur." Offended by his repartee, the man grumbled the two syllables, no extra balderdash.

Then out of the blue, the cab's clapped out radio went brattling, the radio waves transmitting the foremost infamous soprano in the Zentrum, Magistrate Elle Ciel who long imbued millions, now she harangued. "The Juneauton Weltzentrum city-state, must and will by all means maintain its neutrality as long as international conflicts are concerned; a critical element of our national security and economic prosperity, I have no fancies, whatsoever, to engage us in the tug of a proxy warfare. Nonetheless, by name of the noble tenets that bound our city with the greater Occidental Regnum, our glorious second nation, I am pleased to declare the successful attainment of our joint expedition to the reclusive and highest country in the world, Tibet, under the incontestable leadership of Commodore Therese La Margrave. The hand in glove cooperation in exchange of communication material and expertise, was crowned, with the unearthing of the pride of Tibet, envy of the world, the technological paragon from sunken Agartha, the ne plus ultra of the arts of war, Rhevireon. What is the Rhevireon? Who made the Rhevireon and what for? That I am not permitted to disclose my dear people, till the right time comes of course. Sufficient to say our expedition, warmheartedly received by the local populace, was commissioned by his majesty Reting Rinpoche to bring the mysterious object home, to the care of the most acclaimed research organizations in the field, where it is to be subjected to extensive experimentation, for the greater good of the human race, and we shall prove to the world, this young nation nurtured by the odium of our enemies has grown strong, this Occidento-Zentrum State, will spearhead the next stage in human evolution, but if we fail, and we fall, let them know we only fall on their bodies…"

"Seriously though?" jumped in the malcontented driver.

"Shhh!" the other person riding shot gun foully exclaimed, too heedful of the speech she didn't afford to miss the line of gab.

"Nei, we are not victims to their compulsive hatred for our alien cousins," the spiel ran on, "a hate we attribute to a chronic envy for the magnificent achievements of this magnificent creation of God, it is high time the rest of humankind follow our example, we people of the Zentrum, and recognize the reciprocal right of those with whom we share this cosmos, so to share with us quarters of this earth, the era of Homo Sapiens monopoly of this planet is over, nolens volens…" Straightaway, the radio knocked off.

All the way on course of setting up girders for a new order on this land of the midnight sun, the political and military tension between those involved has always been around, escalated into climax with establishment of the Occidental Regnum; the new homeland of the alien race, proceeded to embrace a jingoistic sort of transitory policy nigh to autarky, so to forefend itself against the undying animosity of a league of rogue human-ruled states, starting from armistice agreements with allies part of the game, the Greater Occidento-Zentrum State ended up with the definite withdrawal from the United Nations. This measure in particular, had had ruinous effects on the org in its entirety; reaching a zenith in the forthcoming years with the liquidation of its affairs, toward the foundation of a new legal successor, the Terra Sphaira Alliance, a spectacular success for the Occidento-Zentrum State's soft power on a global scale.

The TESPAL, no other than a front organization hammering out statutes on behalf of the Universal Council, quite fared in veering the ongoing hostility spot light over its founding state members, the Occidento-Zentrum State's bloc of the UN's expatriates.

"You piece of junk!" Back to the kvetch, after a quick failed attempt at mending the receiver, the driver relaunched the prattle loudly, "Magistrate Elle Ciel, what an enfant terrible! Skipping our will on purpose, will of the people." He grumbled, and she was arguably, the second most powerful woman in Juneauton Weltzentrum for the fifth consecutive year of her second term, Magistrate Elle Ciel, incumbent of the satellite state; elected by the popular vote on the surface, blessed by the ulterior motive of the Patriarchs Jurists, the Assembly of the Theocrats. However, the uplift apropos this organic law still, the populace really appreciated what the ring had come up with this round, Elle Ciel leader of the Neopatrician Party; the Neopatricians, strong advocates of Pan-Americanism, were seen by many as the progenies of the defunct reactionary Folksy Whips Party. "I mean, what do they think we're? Sheeple? The Zentrum's impartial to any faction out there they say, at the same time, permitting the alien state to benefit from our minds, for their own glory. I perfectly understand the theory behind the Concession treaty; we impart you the ranch to rule over internally, but your foreign relations policy ain't your business—but c'mon, her talk of neutrality didn't have a speckle of truth to it, just a pars pro toto of something bigger maybe! Rhetoric, arrivistes' rhetoric! To hell with this Rhevireon, what is it anyways? will it pay my pension? What this nation desperately lacks is some dignity!" How dead serious was he about it.

"You know what?" the lady besides him, while easing her protruding jaw, she too appeared to have something to patter about, "I unanimously approve of you mentioning this sir, logically, we shan't go any further through this, what would our distant neighbors' reaction be? We sent an expedition to disputed territories, without the authorization of the internationally recognized administration under which Tibet has forever been a protectorate. The expedition's team members whom I know by name all are natal Juneautonuan citizens, financed by the Occidental Regnum they basically encroached upon the sovereignty of a country with whom we have a terrific record of trade relations, that's jeopardized with such stupid move, and for what! I'm no captive mind but all the talk of this Rhevireon of which we've heard naught before, feels nasty, sinister!"

"That's it ma'am, the whys and wherefores dictum!" he blundered out, doing his best to cope with the wheel, in parallel with the vulgar polemic, "it's ipso facto, taking the wrong step in the game of geopolitics is a point of no return." He declaimed.

"You bet! Heh heh!" returned she with a streak of spastic laughter, her trademark.

"I believe this will ultimately result in long term embargo on trade unions, or even worse lest the war creeps over here!" that expression on his face was priceless, as if fancied himself for a great wit, "and supposing that ever happened, you both ought to volunteer for my friends."

"Is he talking to us?" Hoyden looked daggers at him.

"I don't think we're the ones to count on," Dusk said to the man, his tone tinged with a stain of deceit, "I wouldn't fight a Neopatricians' war at any rate, nor lose a limb for their false gods."

"Good for you!" the driver responded unaffectedly, "never pissed excellence myself in the business of war not even with a map and compass, when it was all about conscription back in my heydays. But let me take a shot at your reproach of the Neopatris, you're not one of those Mug Libs, the students' wing God forbid?"

"Wrong, I'm something of an abstentionist in fact." Dusk kept on the guile, saw fun in him after all, a _simpleton beyond repair!_ Hoyden quietly slurred her last impression of the cabby, and their manners had gotten just too brusk.

"Well, I've casted my ballot for the Mugwump Libs," the woman admitted unashamedly, she went on enquiring without constraint, "in any case, why all the inimicality from your part towards the Mugs, huh?"

"Chill out ma'am, to each their own!" the driver in containing the miscalculated statement, "that's what you'd expect from my likes, a goddamn patrician partisan by birth. A great deal of my kith and kin are half-breeds, never been to college, most chucked up the sponge, couldn't afford that lux, so you get the big picture, they saw in adherence to one of the two majors the expiation for their social mobility fiasco, their highest hit point on the status class ladder."

"Ah, certainly_" and so she simmered down, "just reserve the ebullience for the election day, you'll need it then before now, the campaigns readily set out, I cross fingers that we beat you in the Plebian by the popular vote, the Magistrate for the nonpartisans, if you know what I mean. Hmm! by the way, you do have a lot to say for an uneducated person, respect!" said she, giving him tasteless props in bonus though.

"Wow, you hold on right there," the cabby protested, "when did the uni mean education? and what education! To meet, eat, bleat and retreat. Just for the record, I've got a high school diploma which I also use as a loo cover." Talking about the toilet in the tenement he apportioned with many others; before swinging back to the harsh reality, "and we are who we are, nothing whatsoever, no one whoever gonna change it! say I'll never cotton on to it, what's that? Our two-party system of flawed democracy, the media feed us the hokum! Every time I'm driving this junker, I bet myself, the next person will settle by my side, either a Mugwump or a Neopatri!" As it heated, Dusk and Hoyden sat back, watched and listened to the bunkum.

"Still by far and large the vox populi, and by extension rule of the people technically speaking," the lady remonstrated, "though in end of the day, when every choice's taken awaits for the middleman's approval, oh well! heh heh!"

"The middleman?"

"Them, you know!"

"Oh yeah, the middleman, gotcha!" returned he, and jumping from one subject to another, "oh by the way, what do you do for a living, if I may?"

"Sure, nothing wrong with asking," prone to express her open heartedness, "well, I'm a directress at an orphanage!"

All along the boulevard, the hack-driver and the unidentifiable passenger reeled off their sardonic rant, until the taxi reached the Rontgen passage 5. A vehicular tunnel and one of the twelve underground rapid transits, ingress-egress, to-and-fro the old Juneau borough, their shortcut to downtown Juneauton Weltzentrum.

The Rontgen underpass, made civilian check points, gigantic backscatter X-ray units in charge of imaging whichever machine traveling in or out of there. A subordinate aspect of a much thorough web of decentralized surveillance. The scheme had its origins way back to somewhere in between the Divide Et Impera's dossiers. A constituent part of the ASTHE's quest after secret of the divine on streamlined data mining of the masses on the long run. For this very specific purpose, the Overseers' Arm of Ubiquitous Information Extraction was installed, by necessities of the purges.

Punctually, the cab was permitted access into old Juneau, the blue-collars' home ground, stagnant in time. Penetrating the warren streets of the borough, interlaced in washing lines. Helter-skelter manifolds of clumpy tenement houses, built in the unique and sensational Jugendstil, Art Nouveau architecture; jutting out roofs of acclivitous bronze-clad conical spires, charcoal smoke coiled up into the air out of breathless flues, stuck out of penthouses, fabricated of ceramic bricks, mid-reliefed with foliage patterns entangled, the cornices' gargoyled with fiendish figures; some of the older houses emitted a grunderzeit ambiance engulfed in the profusion of Art Nouveau.

Dusk lowered the cab's disjointed window, the flagstone footpaths swarmed with modest men next to crestfallen women, on daily basis pursued the way to hope against hope, the canned crab factory. Below minimum wages, beyond a shadow of a doubt; yet, it'd been for many a generation the only Atlas around to carry the struggling economy of the enclave on its stinky shoulders, albeit their biggest issue was, their own crab mentality. Down the same track, the school kiddies on their route to the sole school there in existence, seemed not to give a toss as they gathered around the refreshment stalls, or jaywalked they back and forth the shrunken road, where the snarled up vehicles squawked in a cacophony of honking horns.

"Lovely mornings shan't be wasted over this!" cried the driver, "wasted among the gridlock? jeez no!" flummoxed, jabbed he the throttle, freaking his client out when he set to thread his way through, in sinuous stitches.

"Whoa, lo and behold! sir, don't tell me that's a pegleg!" the woman, whose name should in some way match Rosie O'Donnell, at last noticing the atypical leg she whooped astounded, "how on earth you're driving with such thing?! Just drop me by, please!"

"Don't vex ma'am," sought to allay her worries, "Imma deviate for a shortcut nearby, that's it, I'm done with this black hole of Calcutta." He gruffly said.

"And I took the shanty town for a cutoff, here you are, it proved the contrary," she nearly spat out the words, "just please be cautious, is this legal in the first place?"

"Of course it is, this is nothing compared to the rage on the American roads; ours quite sanctioned in comparison." The man was keen on preserving the image of the gentleman to whom life was unfair. "No, seriously, it's always like this at seven ams, people stock racing towards their workplaces or whatever aim in mind! I hate it. But hey, what's up with all the sensitivity, nothing wrong with an artificial limb; ma'am sorry to say it but I found your concerns unsubstantial, and that overreaction offensive, this is blatantly a form of ableism." He gave to rave.

"Holy moly, my bad, shouldn't have acted such_"

Sometime later, hardly managed they to procure a pass out of the enclave. Heading towards locus of the financial district, home to the stock market, and many a citadel of those multi-billion firms that sell people promises to pay them later, but the promises are never fulfilled, when the insurer decides to forfeit the business since management spent all premium on floozies and private jets; for the most part of it, insurance companies.

V  
ALETHEIA

March 23rd.

07:45 am, off a distance, stared he at the cab as it drove Hoyden away, the car had just dropped him off by the vast stairway that led up the colonnaded entrance of the private, Aletheia Institute of Transhumanist Development; erected on a rocky hill in the style of the Parisian Sacré Coeur, while constructed according to Art Deco principles the building took the trend to a whole new level. Vigilant at its entrance was the Lamassu, a prodigious statue of a human-headed bull, this hermaphrodite winged bull of Mesopotamia with its anthropomorphic visage of a bearded woman, glowered in the way of staffers and the packs of students attending, who briskly and synchronously took to the grand stairs as though they were elements of a soc-real propaganda poster, attired in sternly fashioned ebony-colored uniforms, with iron-woggled blue-stripped neckerchiefs, the rigorously self-disciplined all-male students strutted off on cycles of politically charged patriotic speeches by Forefathers of the Greater Occidento-Zentrum State, six days a week, one hour a day, conveyed into ears via a loudspeaker niched inside the gaping snout of the Lamassu, the alma mater of the prestigious institute, its godmother, posed before the building's façade on high above which the aphorism enchased in jade, a riddle, read:

 ** __** _There are two sisters: one gives birth unto the other  
and she in turn, gives birth to the first.  
Who are the sisters?_

That was the mantra, the sort of mind manipulation to only work with people, exhibiting signs of amour-propre, and that's the rule of collective identity, shared by those who toppled the pecking order.

The Aletheia Institute of Transhumanist Development, a post-graduate research academy, drew to its ranks legions from four quarters of the globe, best of the best; the idea behind the school was that of an extremely competitive educational environment where only those with exceptional hold of character, higher than average intelligence were accepted, a place where no physical flaw was tolerated. Half-breeds out of consideration, exclusively full-blooded only male human candidates, no less than twenty-three years of age no older than twenty-seven, from all nations and ethnicities were qualified for admission, on condition they underwent the intensive fortnight entrance exams, brutal examination, mental and physical, that at times led to the immediate elimination of all competitors, resulting in a gap in said freshman years.

Education at the Aletheia was free of charge, all expenses were covered by the institute itself, no distinction was made between Juneautonuan citizens and admitted international students. Graduates of the institute were destined to lead the next phase of human evolution, intellectually and physically; they were entrusted with the Elders' vision of an ultra-human type, to release their vision of a superior animal, in their image carved.

"Ode to the Numinous Star, considered by many scholars to be a milestone of the Lex Aurvanthilis, pinnacle of the gnosis, an idea scratching the stratospheric regions of enlightenment, towards our universal salvation. Last chapter of the book, the ode chronicles the godhead, the Arkhitekton, divulging the word to His hierophant, the word of the dire portents before the end time and the palingenesis of all, when the microcosm unites with the macrocosm, the Atman with the Brahman, to bring balance back to this world of conflicting dualities, of the insane and sane, the dream and reality, the lie and truth, the ethereal and corporeal, the female and male, the destroyer and builder, the antimatter and matter." Said Dr. Ruvelhart, he paused, supped a glass of milkshake he then carried on, "the ode in its entirety, being written in two parts, with dactylic hexameter scaling its beginning before it swiftly climaxes, and in unison wanes then in complexity, as the anapaestic tetrameter brings it to a close with a dimeteric foot. We are given no inkling as of why this scheme of rhythm embedded in quantitative meter was abode by, albeit, its uniqueness is indeed reserved not for its meter, but outstretches that to its overall unprecedented structure, for these stanzas were put together in a particular arrangement, only from bottom and so upward these lines ought to be read, an arrangement where the inverted ode stands like a spire thrust into the sky, pointing to the falling one; a Tower of Babel, verse after verse, we are elevated higher and higher athwart the unfolding thirty-three stairs of wisdom, the last stanza told in three different tongues, is left unfinished, which serves, if you acquire the right tools to see, a lofty purpose, in the lateral sense." Dr. Ruvelhart, Dusk's professor, further elaborated. A ponytailed partially baldpated man, who clearly suffered from premature baldness, whenever would he make a remark, he'd go brushing off his inches-long beard, out of an old habit to diverge attention away from the patch.

Standing at the rostrum, behind him was an isopsephic character map tagged on an interactive board; Professor Ruvelhart holding spin of the holy writ flat open, he read, the last line was the beginning, his reading was prosaic, and his voice, his voice had a sonorous undertone to it.

 _Scientia solus potentia est.  
Beguiled! Nether-world in schmaltz-fest;  
Aber da, ich trotzdem nicht erkenne dich echt selbst!_

 _In forlorn Apathana.  
Bonfires of anoint'd martyrs on thy dawning past of arcana.  
Lichened scrolls in yon grove, aglow caverns of arches;  
O'er mount haggard, sheer crags, stone-stepped marshes  
Arise! Initiated ones of yore, unto whence had come the fire,_

 _Thereat redeem'd Apathana.  
Misled the burgeoning gale into her barrow tomb.  
But gone's gone, and life only doth what's to be done;  
And now the e'en tides guided the forenoon,  
For she never knew what'd she gotten until it was gone;_

 _Thereat castigat'd Apathana.  
O for the betrothed! Foreordain'd to gallous death ridden.  
Scrambling rocks, hauled by war pigs goading heriots;  
Athwart ore of dales hollow, were their wheels hard riven,  
Erst ye roads diverged, mount'd they skythed chariots,_

 _Thereat culpable Apathana.  
Kent the mysteries' ruins 'n didst toll the rosy bells.  
Till forebears of thine aeon, maidens, suckled many a limb  
The horse they sacrificed, sepulchered cremains into wells;  
Bemused! Ledgemen beneath, on arc iridal etched thy hymn_

 _Thereat miscreant Apathana.  
Or Messidor! The month of lore, were there deans in fanciest miens.  
On Nivose! Brotherly folks dwelt courts; timeworn their roots  
Ne'er been touched twice a solstice, by ye all-seeing hand of men,  
Begirt eclipse, son of luna and sol! Inaugurated the solemn moot_

 _Thereat remember'd Apathana.  
Yonder grove inscribed trove, lichened caverns of arches.  
Maggots 'n loam, grubbed carrions foretellers of the fall'n pagan  
Onto mount haggard, sheer crags, stone-stepped marshes;  
Bestride! Initiated ones of yore, o'er thy garden pillars laden,_

 ** _LexAur 174:91_**

"Do you believe in God, their God, professor?" his question came unanticipated. Dusk whose seat occupied a secluded spot at the last raw in that lecture hall, summoned the prying eyes of many a student, sneaking a glimpse at this person who would challenge their master with such enquiry.

"This is a personal question," waffled the professor, loath to respond, he nevertheless, under pressure from his own students grew bound to flesh it out expositing, "I don't grasp the point behind positing such, but if you insist; it is in doubt of what I teach I want to believe, I'm an agnostic, Mr. Cezraef. I seek God, but I still not have found Him, their God."

The Arkhitekton, the Absolute, the Elders' God, in their own words, _the Arkhitekton, chief builder of the universe by and according to laws of science and the occult_. The Lex Aurvanthilis, LexAur, their scripture, which perpetuated the canonical texts of their faith, Aurvanthilism, the new Western religion, religion of the alien race, was at the core of the Aletheia's curriculum.

The new faith established in the theocratic Occidental Regnum, practiced by the Eldersian communities there, when a syncretic movement branched out of this dualist cult soon arose among the human vassals of the Regnum, the peasants proselytized one another into the mechanical worship of the Arkhitekton; and the cult slowly made its way south to the human-ruled secular microstate of Juneauton Weltzentrum,

At present, Aurvanthilism had matured to pose a considerable threat to the ecumenical denominations of the entire northern hemisphere, and more broadly, to secular humanism.

10:08 am, Dusk leaned over the rooftop's parapet, the Aletheia's rooftop, a quite place he retreated to at the end of each class, remote from the teeming hallways of the school. Above him, the sun was wrestling herself out the herd of clouds of a rough-hewn nature. Beneath them, at the horizon, at the lip of Juneauton's coastline, was the port, port of the Weltzentrum, tinged with a tremendous mantle of heather mixture, that spread along the container terminals amidst the mess of maritime trade.

At the other side of the rooftop, there was a girl, whenever she cast her sight afar the archipelago's strand, at the deep blue, she'd the impression of it becoming frightener, wilder at the vanishing point. The girl gazed at the ocean liners and cargo ships transpiring from the abating gloom, tailed by the seabirds, and escorted by the skidding wave against wave the ships into the harbor ensconced themselves.

Dusk impulsively studied the tantalizing movements of this girl he never met before, rarely a woman of her sort was seen at the institute, she definitely was not a staff member, what was her secret? The girl pulled a hard packet out of her blazer, sleeves rolled up. She flipped up the top, sparked up one. At a random moment, a whiff from the icy shores fondled her cascading curly hair, when a broken beam flung out of the debilitating clouds, reacting to the cig's smoke she exhaled, the sunlight befalling her tumbles of tresses gave them a tint of rust.

Dusk went smitten with what he'd just seen, an enchantress of provocative appeal, nipping at butt of the cigarette she caught a glance of him from across, and briefly they locked eyes.

 ** _To be continued._**


End file.
